Notes for owners · Business growth
Marketing and sales in one budget: how to split spend between getting enquiries and closing them
A test for the next rupee: does it buy more enquiries or more follow-up on the ones you already paid for? A worked comparison of a second telecaller against a third ad set.
The GullySales team · Updated 17 Oct 2026 · 5 min read
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Marketing says it needs more ads. Sales says the enquiries are not worth calling. The next rupee should go where the leak is. If you pay for enquiries and a good share of them get one call and no second, a second telecaller is likely to bring in more orders than a third ad set. If every enquiry is chased well and your team is waiting for the phone, ads come first. You can tell which by counting last month's enquiries at four points. A short comparison then settles the argument between marketing and sales.
Count the four steps
Take the last full month and fill in four numbers from your sheet or call log.
- Enquiries received.
- Enquiries called back the same working day.
- Enquiries that got a second or third attempt, if the first did not connect or the buyer said "later".
- Enquiries that received a quote or a proposal.
Then the fifth number: orders. If you do not have these counts, that is your finding. It means the spend question cannot be answered yet, and a simple sheet should come before any new budget. The note on why enquiries produce few sales shows where they usually go missing.
The next-rupee test
Compare two uses of the same extra money. These figures are illustrative, so replace them with yours.
| Option A: more ads | Option B: second telecaller | |
|---|---|---|
| Extra cost per month | ₹25,000 media | ₹25,000 salary |
| What it adds | About a fifth more enquiries, to the same overworked caller | Second and third attempts on enquiries now dropped |
| Close rate on the added business | Same as today, or lower if the caller is stretched | Check your own: the close rate on enquiries that got a second attempt |
| Risk | Pays to reach more people who then wait | You need to hire, train and manage someone |
Suppose a month gives 100 enquiries and 10 orders, and one caller reaches 60 of them within the day and gives a second attempt to only 15. Option A adds 20 enquiries, of which the stretched caller might manage a few extra orders. Option B takes the second-attempt count from 15 towards the 40 who were never chased properly. If even a handful of those turn into orders, B has paid for itself without a single extra ad.
A rough way to read it: if the share of enquiries without a second attempt is larger than the share you would add by advertising, hire the caller first. When the gap is small, spend on ads.
Finding the thin link: a nursery and landscaping firm in Akola
This is an invented nursery in Akola that sells plants to homes and lays out gardens for housing societies. It runs two ad sets, one for homes and one for societies, and the owner is tempted by a third aimed at schools. The owner answers the phone between site visits.
The owner does the count. Of 90 enquiries, 55 were called back the same day. Only 12 had a second attempt. Quotes went to 30. Most of the silent ones had said "call after the weekend" and nobody did.
The first idea is to cut the society ad set because it gives poor-quality leads. The count disagrees: society enquiries asked for quotes at the same rate as home ones, and the weakness was calls not made. So the ads stay at their current level and a part-time caller joins, with a script and a "call again on" column. After two months the second-attempt count has gone from 12 to 31, but the caller's pay comes out of a thin margin on small garden jobs, and only some of the revived enquiries turn into orders. The third ad set waits until the callers are no longer the limit.
Where the money sits in each choice
Marketing spend buys the chance of a conversation. Sales spend buys a conversation that is handled well. If you read the budget as "ads against people", you will argue forever. Read it as a chain of four steps and ask which link is thinnest.
Other places that count as sales spend, and are often forgotten: a CRM subscription so follow-ups are not in somebody's head, training for the people who answer, a better quotation template, and a visit vehicle.
How to hold the split over time
Review the four counts every month or so, whichever rhythm suits your team, and move the extra rupee towards whichever step has the biggest drop. Do not move a whole budget at once. Shift a portion, give it a full buying cycle, and compare. If your sales cycle runs a long time, a month's data will mislead, so look at enquiries by the month they arrived and trace their orders afterwards. The older post on deciding your marketing budget covers how the total is first set.
When this test does not apply
If you have fewer than a few dozen enquiries a month, the counts are too thin to read, and a single big order will distort them. In that case use judgement and keep the commitment small. If your buyers are few and large, a second telecaller is the wrong tool. A senior person's time with each account matters more, and the money may belong in visits.
Also be wary if the telecaller will be rewarded only by orders closed this month. That can push them away from the slow, honest follow-up that wins the larger buyers.
Write down last month's four numbers
Put the four numbers on one sheet before anyone argues for ads or for people, and add the sales costs people forget, such as the CRM subscription, to the same page. If you want the two sides set against each other with someone else, sales and marketing budgeting is the service for that, and the marketing section holds the related posts. When you have the numbers and want to describe the situation, tell us what you need.
